Feenin

In Feenin, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye traces R&B music’s continuing centrality in Black life since the late 1970s. Focusing on various musical production and reproduction technologies such as auto-tune and the materiality of the BlackFem singing voice, Weheliye counteracts the widespread popular and scholarly narratives of the genre’s decline and death. He shows how R&B remains a thriving venue for the expression of Black thought and life and a primary archive of the contemporary moment. Among other topics, Weheliye discusses the postdisco evolution of house music in Chicago and techno in Detroit, Prince and David Bowie in relation to appropriations of Blackness and Euro-whiteness in the 1980s, how the BlackFem voice functions as a repository of Black knowledge, the methods contemporary R&B musicians use to bring attention to Black Lives Matter, and the ways vocal distortion technologies such as the vocoder demonstrate Black music’s relevance to discussions of humanism and posthumanism. Ultimately, Feenin represents Weheliye’s capacious thinking about R&B as the site through which to consider questions of Blackness, technology, history, humanity, community, diaspora, and nationhood.

“This cutting-edge book demonstrates the work of a thinker who has devoted a great deal of research and care to the study of the sonic, historiographic, and aesthetic consequences of Blackness. Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s concentration on the rich concurrences of Blackness and R&B is a true blessing. Deftly mapping out new avenues of critical pursuit devoted to the art of Blackness, Feenin is a stunning work.”, “Feenin is less a collection of essays and more a playlist of Alexander Ghedi Weheliye’s greatest hits. It assembles a series of captivating essays that register the complex sonic frequencies of Black life with resounding effect. The ‘tracks’ gathered here demonstrate the force of Weheliye’s incisive theorizing and its profound contribution to sounding the rhythm, vibes, and groove of Black studies in the ‘forceful fullness of the Now.’”

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human and Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, both also published by Duke University Press.